Monday, 27 July 2009

FADA held the grand opening of our community garden last Saturday, and everything went well. I had done a radio show, press releases and a lot of phone calls to spread the word about this, and I think it paid off – crowds of people came, our network of interested people increased, and everyone seemed to have a great time.

Local poet Des Egan unveiled the wooden sign saying “Bia Linn” (“Our Food”), hand-carved by one of our members. One of our members, a mushroom farmer, gave a presentation on growing your own mushrooms, while another, a nun who has worked in Africa, spoke about Fair Trade. Still another spoke about edible flowers, and I spoke about permaculture. Photographers came from the local newspapers, and The Girl got her picture in the paper.

I was especially pleased with The Girl – as soon as other children started arriving, she led them around the garden in a hand-held chain, telling them, “These are peas – I’ll show you how to take them out of the pods. These are tomatoes – don’t eat the leaves.”

Finally, two musicians set up in the middle of the garden and began playing a mix of traditional and modern folk music and couples danced in the middle of the garden. Picture a young woman singing an Irish-sounding version of Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution,” surrounded by greenery, as children laughed and chased each other between the garden beds. That was our day, and it was good.

Monday, 20 July 2009

I didn’t realise until tonight that this was the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing,* which risks being remembered in the same way we remember other anniversaries like the Woodstock festival, or the “malaise” speech, or even the Berlin Wall coming down.

This event holds an altogether calibre than any of those things, or indeed anything else in history. This was the first time that humans – or any species on Earth, or anywhere else that we know of – travelled through space to land on an alien world. That world may be barren and uninteresting, but that only makes the footprints we left there eternal, a reminder to anyone coming by in a million or billion years from now, “We lived here, and we made it this far. That was the kind of people we were.”

Sorry if this sounds melodramatic, but I’m serious – there was never anything like it, and may never be again. That deserves a moment of remembrance.

I hope that we can pull together enough energy to reach further -- to go to Mars, cast CFCs or some other greenhouse gas into its atmosphere to warm it, and introduce life, if there is none there already. I would love to not see our species keep all its genetic eggs in one planetary basket. Or, those few trips to the Moon might be all there was.

For some reason, even before I remembered the date, The Girl asked me about this very thing:

“Will you and I go into space someday, Papa?”

Oh, I wish, I said, but it takes a lot of work to get someone into space, and we’ve only been able to do it a few times.

“Why?”

Well, I said, it’s quite far to go, and it’s straight up. You know how tired you get even after climbing all the steps. It’s much farther up than that, and there are no steps.

“If I could go, I would want to take a candle, because it’s so dark.”

It is dark, but there are stars, I said, deciding not to go into the issue of air in space.

“I’d like to meet some aliens!”

So would I, I said. But even if we can’t meet them, maybe someday we’ll talk to them.”

“How can we do that?” she asked.

Well, I said, the same way we talk to people on a mobile phone – we can send signals.

“But we don’t even know their house number!”

True, I said – we'll have to call different stars, and see if there's anyone home.

“How will they even know what we are saying?”

Good question, I said. They probably don’t speak English – but two plus two is four everywhere, and everything in the universe is made of the same stuff we are. So we have something in common.

Thursday, 16 July 2009

We saw this and other islands from a boat in Lough Corrib, near where "The Quiet Man" was filmed. We were told the island, large enough to support a few people, has lain abandoned since the 1930s and became forested again.

It occured to me that all Ireland, and much of Europe, Asia and North America, was covered with dense forests like these. I was also struck by how quickly everything returned to normal.

Saturday, 11 July 2009

Gorse is one of the commonest scrub plants here -- thorny, tough, and inedible to almost everything, so it is rarely trimmed by grazing. On the Curragh, the rolling plains a few kilometres from us that has been used for horse racing since the Romans, giant gorse clumps rise like mushrooms four metres tall over the fields.

On the other hand, it has lovely yellow flowers all year long, and it makes an effective barrier for animals, so it's a popular hedge. Although I've never tried it, I'm told you can make it into a nice wine as well.